DARRELL NORMAN: What else can I write about?

Now and then, a reader will ask why I write so much about the past. I ask myself that, too. My best answer is that’s where the stories are.m.

By Darrell NormanTimes Columnist

Now and then, a reader will ask why I write so much about the past. I ask myself that, too. My best answer is that’s where the stories are.A milepost I passed recently reminded me there is much more road behind than ahead, so it feels natural to look over my shoulder for the footprints I have left.It is much easier for me to illuminate scenes from the past than to spout pretentious commentary on class wars in America, religious wars in the Arab world or rap sheets in college football.Jesse Culp was a Gadsden Times columnist and a genuine folksy character from Marshall County. Old-timey ways were his favorite subject: hog killing, hominy making, vegetable canning and mule plowing. He could warm up a memory of the Great Depression in no time, and his readers loved it.My remembrance of things past does not go back as far as Jesse’s, certainly not as far as Leon Hale’s. Hale is 91 and has been writing columns for more than 60 years. What a model for anyone in the column racket.He has written for the Houston Chronicle since 1984. Before that, he wrote for the Houston Post for 32 years. He still blogs daily and writes a Sunday column of personal commentary for the Chronicle. And here I am thinking it is about time to dry up.Hale said he was 62 when the Chronicle recruited him. He reminded his editors every two or three years that he was 68, 70, 75, 80, and asked if they thought it was time he quit. They always told him “No.”Hale is not only a model for his longevity, but also for his mastery of the short first-person essay. Philip Lopate, editor of one of my bibles, “The Art of the Personal Essay,” wrote in The New York Times that Hale was one of the three best columnists writing in America.With so many years of memory in the bank, Hale writes a lot about the past, but he is not stuck there. He still travels and picks up material along the way. I am not sure he still drives, but he wrote in his Oct. 1 blog that he stopped along I-95 in Rhode Island on the way to New York City from Cape Cod.He said the Texas First Commandment was not to forget that Texas was the largest state (ignoring Alaska’s entry in the union in 1959) and Rhode Island was the smallest. Hale decided to compare the two states. They parked along the highway and he pulled out his laptop.He confirmed that his Harris County was larger than the state of Rhode Island, noted that two brothers who built a huge cattle empire in Texas came from Rhode Island, and the Rhode Island Red breed of chicken came (big surprise) from Rhode Island.That fact triggered a childhood memory of when his family raised Rhode Island Reds and a rooster swallowed his mother’s wedding ring. Father came home in the middle of the day, wrung the rooster’s neck and performed the surgery to recover the ring.I will not try to match Hale’s ring story, but if you want, I can tell you about standing in the middle of our chicken yard when I was about 12, pulling the heads off a dozen or two young Rhode Island Red fryers bound for our freezer.I used to read Hale’s columns when he wrote three times a week and now that I see he is still at it, I will pay him regular online visits and feel ashamed of feeling too old to write.My doctor used to tell me on every visit I had 20 to 30 more good years. He gradually whittled his estimate down to 20 and last month he cut it to 15 to 20. This is more friendly encouragement than medical forecast.He also tells me to write my book “while I still have time.”Leon Hale has written a shelf of books. Some are novels, but most are compilations of his columns. For years, I have toyed with the idea of sweeping some past columns into a pile for my own book. The only publisher I can think of is Kinko’s.I have tinkered for some time with a draft of a farewell column, just to have on hand, but after catching up on Hale, I may just trash it. He reminds me I can still cobble a column together by digging around in the past.

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